Everybody has gone cold from all the standing around at the FT line.
I don't get it, are these teams blind to facts? I don't remember the exact numbers but when team foul DJ 20+ times the Clips are pretty unbeatable. It's like they don't care and they continue to lose. Sad.
Yeah, the facts are pretty strongly against the strategy (I think the commentators just said the Clippers are 18-2 this season when teams hack DJ). But to be fair, they're the kind of facts that are really hard to accept when the guy shoots 10-28. That an offensive rating of 71.4!
But the trap that teams are falling into is comparing offensive efficiency in a Hack-a-Jordan game to offensive efficiency in a regular NBA game. Rhythm is the issue. If you could actually execute your own offense through all of the stoppages, the strategy would be absolutely dominant. But teams just aren't able to do that.
They need to start comparing the Clippers' Hack-a-Jordan offensive efficiency to their own team's Hack-a-Jordan offensive efficiency. I think if they did this, they would recognise pretty quickly that the strategy is self-defeating.
Worth noting:
On average, these 14 games saw hack-a-DJ start with an average opponent deficit of 8.8 points. To put a very broad point on that, the Inpredictable Win Probability calculator says an 8.8-point lead with 5 minutes to go in the fourth quarter results in a win 92.7 percent of the time. In other words teams tend to hack DeAndre when they’re almost certainly going to lose the game.
The thing that makes broader number dumps less than useful is that taking DeAndre’s numbers in aggregate and comparing them to the Clippers’ offense misses the entire point of fouling Jordan. You aren’t looking for a long-term strategic gain; it’s a short-term gambit. When you foul DeAndre, you strip all of the complexity and redundancies out of an offense, and give it a single point of failure—DJ making his [dang] free throws—and a single release valve, like those offensive rebounds 538 pointed out. Over the course of a game, the Clippers offense is not volatile; it has good shooters, good ball handlers, and good passers all over. But DeAndre at the line? That is a very volatile proposition. This is precisely why teams begin to use it in situations—the clock is short and there’s no time to wait on season-long trends to show up on the scoreboard. Sometimes this works, like in Game 1 of Rockets-Blazers last year. Other times it doesn’t, like in the 15 Clippers wins in that TNT graphic up top.
http://regressing.deadspin.com/teams-fouling-deandre-jordan-lose-because-theyre-alread-1698994779
Interesting read, but I disagree with the premise.
The author's claiming that expected value is irrelevant because the "entire point" of the Hack-a-Jordan is exploiting volatility (I prefer "variance", so I'll use that from now on). If that was the case, then the only viable application of the strategy would be when facing an otherwise insurmountable deficit in the fourth quarter. In this scenario, a large variance in expected value allows teams to close a large gap in the unlikely event that Jordan's free throw shooting results in a near worst-case probabilistic outcome. This is a viable strategy because the game is already considered lost, so there's nothing left for you to lose if he hits his free throws at anything close to his expected rate.
In any scenario other than an insurmountable deficit, ignoring expected value is pure gambling, and getting excited by large variance is no better than wishful thinking. I have to believe that NBA coaches are smarter than that, so the author of the article has to be wrong. Clearly when NBA coaches employ the Hack-a-Jordan in the first quarter, they are doing so because they think their offense is expected to score at a better rate than Jordan's free throw percentages. Whether or not they are right in thinking that is the question, and that's why I think the article (
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/intentionally-fouling-deandre-jordan-is-futile/) that this guy seems to be attacking is far more informative.
The author of that article put a lot more thought into calculating offensive rating than I did (I forgot about offensive rebounds and transition defense, doh!). But even he didn't take into account my point about analysing the effect that Hack-a-Jordan has on the
perpetrating team's offense.
Topic: NBA Playoffs Season 2014-2015 (Read 551512 times)